"Textures are the Fonts of the 90's" - J. Gibson

A lifetime noting visual patterns and an interest in photography combined with new technology and markets to inspire a suite of texture libraries. In the early 1990's CD-ROM was just beginning to spin up to multimedia speed and F+F had been mastering these and laserdiscs to create animated simulations and other projects enough to know the potential was great.

Wraptures™ One and Two

At the MicroSoft's CD-ROM Conference in 1989 years of three-d modeling, rendering & animation knowledge and skills came together to inspire F+F founder Jonathan Gibson to create a remarkable collection of useful graphics. The name derived from combining the words WRAPping texTURES one night after a heady mixture of expresso & ice-cream and aerobic endorphins induced a pun-filled fugue state. Stir in a lot of hours polishing pixels, refining hands-on knowledge of 3D animation and video preparation and a stand-out new graphic library suitable for graphic professionals was soon spinning up underneath F+F.

By the end of summer 1990 Wraptures One was available at MacWorld Boston. At less than a dollar each for a hand-crafted pattern our retail $129 for 130+ textures the quality/pixel greater than any other product of it's type - and the market response was overwhelmingly positive. The BYTE magazine Best Of List and MacWorld Magazine reviews pushed our unique "smart-pixel" approach to textures into the public spotlight. Success was immediate and orders flowed in and 'ere too long a minor ROM Barony was established.

Wraptures has always been positioned as an essential toolkit for the Virtual Reality world. To this end it was established no texture would be smaller than 512x512 - when 128x128 was the industry standard - and an alpha mask, or grayscale transparency graphic would accompany each file wherever possible. An image needed a good excuse, or alternate stand-in that could be argued, before it made the final cut.

Top-notch quality graphic backdrops with an eye toward the fresh beauty of nature and fetish grunge of urban decay.

Page Overtures® One and Two

These full page high-resolution textures are Leaf-scanned with 48 bits/pixel @ 266 dpi for offset printer output, even to European A4 size. Although the uncompressed files remained off-line during the CD-ROM wars, it may be feasible to release them now that distribution has evolved, but these images shipped at the top-most JPEG loss-less settings.

Page Overtures One
100 high resolution images on a CD-ROM

JPEG 2400 x 3000 pixels @ 266 dpi.

Our philosophy on Copyright is generous, make something wonderful and don't look back - this did not allow you to repackage any of this material with mere minor alterations and calling it your own. Specifically, you were free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work & to make derivative work, but NOT allowed to redistribute the materials on this site. You were encouraged to make both personal fun and commercial use of these works.
Form and Function has maintained the copyrights to this work via our distribution licenses through the years. This matter has become problematic when our imagery is been spotted on other sites with claims {or not} to ownership. Thus far all groups contacted have removed such material, but there is no substitute for a strong presence reminding all of where this originated.

"Looping full-screen, full-motion, digital NTSC {640x480}, textures.

"WREELS" are full screen looping video and animation textures for music video editors and multimedia developers. Also included are alpha channel masks and background files for composing moving media.

WraptureReels® One

Today, we all understand what large files are like but back-in-the-day when digital video was essentially uncompressed and enormous so few had machines to wield the bulky data-files ... let alone experience with such technology and work procedures. Most computers simply choked and fell-over in a heap playing them back. WraptureReels were best for the video professional used to extended frame-by-frame output methods - and developers using the leading-edge of high-end gear.

Form and Function entered Apple's 1st round of QuickTime 1.0 ßeta to complete WraptureReels as every other media container up to this point had severe limitations. Previous self-contained sequence files such as MacroMind's PICS format had file size limitations of 16MB and without compression this unseen limit would destroy one's files when it was exceeded - it appeared the data would need to be sold as single sequential image files.
Booting our machines w/o QuickTime installed in this XXIst century is like walking around naked. At full-frame, full-motion, JPEG compressed, NTSC video WraptureReels was a wee little bit ahead of it's time. Alas, this was an experimental and ambitious product and there was never a published WREELS Two disc. It was also painful to produce for production reasons that may find there explanation here someday.

The sneak who steals these pixels carries away my world and pockets the credit

'Da Oith ' icon began as a 1024x512 image map of the earth created, pixel by fat-bit zoomed-in pixel, from some old atlas books and a globe laying around the Form and Function office. This texture map and associated alpha channel art was a side project that slowly grew more elaborate and detailed - one could argue it spawned a whole product line. Owners of Wraptures One know and love the source image file as Terra 1.0.
Strata 3D was used to make a ray-traced view of a cloudless earth resulting in a 2Kx2K image - hefty for the time - used for various Wraptures ID branding and marketing material. This was shrunk down to 32px and formed the basis for the desktop icon intended for the CD-ROM volume. Macintosh icons at this point came in several preset bit-depths and resolutions and we set about making a 16x16 8-bit, a 16x16 4-bit color, a one-bit version of large and small sizes.
That's just 16 pixels, but to the determined artist it is an expansive landscape.

Our Mosaic 'collage-ist' left the image almost unchanged, but for two connecting nodes {often mistaken as arrows} and called it their own.
We did take it as a sign of respect our fat lil' globes' colors were left alone but for a limited border-color shift to match their add-on blue nodes. Now, this seems fair-use... It's just well, _some_ official NCSA credit would be nice.
{SIGH - now if only Clark and Andreesen had come to F+F for a proper interface design Netscape might still be king. I'm just saying you just don't know about these things...}.
Anyway, someday I'll sort through the old db records and see if we sold a disc to any of them.

This ICON has legs...
Many may even claim they made this icon, but we gently mock those foolish mortals, for we put the dark orange burning pixel in the middle of the smoking bruised Amazon basin for a reason. What's theirs?
Our planet is a universal theme and as countless others use it as well there seemed little one can do to stop it - and I never intended keep our baby from mutating, growing up, get tattoos and spiky hair... - it's simply time to lay it out for the very minor footnote to history this image occupies.

Feel warm + fuzzy?
Have your own brush with greatness by tasking Jonathan Gibson and Form + Function to make your own big -or- small footnote to History Not Yet Written.

- Jonathan Gibson -